“Qot”

Under his Black to Comm alias, Hamburg’s Marc Richter has spent the past 15 years tunneling mazes through dark ambient. The only real constant in his work is its disorienting quality: Vinyl loops, acoustic instruments, and scraps of found sound are swirled into a claustrophobic murk. His Jemh Circs project, on the other hand, looks toward the light. Its latest song, “Qot,” was made by sampling contemporary pop music off YouTube, chopping it up with a granular sampler (a kind of sonic slicer-dicer), and molding the minuscule pieces back into a song-like form. Richter says he no longer remembers which song he sampled, which isn’t entirely surprising, because there’s nothing recognizable about the constituent parts of “Qot”; the track’s tones are smooth and featureless, and they hover halfway between the plink of a piano key and a singer’s wordless coo.

What’s most striking about his sounds on “Qot” is the way they jitter in place—chiming like an open car door, bouncing like marbles scattering across the floor, creaking like worn-out bedsprings. There’s something profoundly soothing about these jumbled cadences; you can sink into them the way you would any repetitive incidental sound, like rainfall or ocean waves. But a wistful undercurrent runs through the finished composition. Chattering constellations of tones coalesce into swelling chords; all those anonymous blips come to resemble church choirs and soaring electric guitars. Recycling random audio off YouTube, Jemh Circs’ process couldn’t be less sentimental, but the results turn out to be sneakily emotive.